Poyzin's Mini Normal Review, June 2020

[Ircher]

This looks close to balance, but scum have a bit too much power. Having two roles being masons with each other greatly increase their power since they can coordinate abilities and whatnot. The neapolitan is also pretty solid.

[Ircher]

On a different topic, would a Tracker Mason + Voyeur Mason be more powerful or less powerful than a Watcher Mason + Follower Mason?

Watcher is a really strong role for town, especially when they have a mason role to check. On the flipside, Voyeur is generally considered a pretty weak role as it can only confirm what happened and not so much who did what. So Tracker + Voyeur would be much weaker than Watcher + Follower.

My main suggestion would be that you significantly tone down the power of scum to only having a single role. It is actually a bit uncommon for scum to have multiple power roles in a mini normal. Aside from that, you'll likely need to replace the watcher with something else due to the mason interaction.

[Ircher]

Also, one thing you'll learn as you design and run setups is that towns tend to be really bad at setup-speccing and playing their roles optimally. In the case of the Neapolitan, I probably would hold onto the results for the while even with a non-VT check because Neapolitan is really a role suited for getting innos, not guilties, but my point is that you cannot really predict what a player will do ahead of time, and more times than not, they'll amaze you.

[Ircher]

There are certain roles that when paired with a town watcher leads to somewhat broken (for town) interactions. For instance, if you have an IC that forcibly activated day 1, scum are almost always going to shoot the IC. The issue is that if there is a watcher in the game, the watcher has every reason in the world to watch that slot, so town basically gets a free scum lynch. Scum would feel horribly cheated in that instance and rightfully so. A similar thing could occur in this setup in that the Watcher mason has zero reason not to watch their mason buddy. If they are both forced to claim to confirm themselves, scum have to guess which one to kill (assuming the masons don't full claim and only claim the mason part of their role). Yes, ninja helps negate it, but it is still an awful interaction that would make many people mad at you post-game if it occurred.

[Ircher]

Maybe the review thread should be public and linked since the game is open? There's really no point keeping a review of an open setup closed.